Went Down to the Crossroads
by Velvien
Summary: The devil's toll is steep indeed. Azrael origin one-shot.


**A/N: So I got new stories working again. Yay. Have something that I wrote back and June, was never able to post, and probably should have expanded upon.**

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><p>Project Dragunov. An attempt by Sector Seven to gain equal footing against the NOL through the artificial enhancement of a man—a super-soldier, if you will—through a chemical injection, a corrupted derivation of a tremendous power. Never wanting for strength, never having his endurance ground down, never being affected by what the NOL could throw at him. Decades of research and development led to the creation of such a serum; all that was needed was a test subject, someone desperate enough to go through with an unknown procedure that could very well end his or her life.<p>

Enter a frail scientist from another faction of Sector Seven—the man who, years later, would terrorize the battlefields of Ikaruga as Azrael, the Mad Dog. There was something he needed strength for. To protect? To save? To defeat? The memory of why this man sought such power has long faded, even from the mind of the monster he became. But whatever the reason, he sought this power, a desperate craving to become stronger and fight.

And so the first trial of Project Dragunov was arranged. In a laboratory far beneath the surface of Yabiko, the crimson serum was injected into this man's veins. The metamorphosis began, and by the time it finished, he no longer resembled who he used to be, redubbed by the committee overseeing Project Dragunov "Azrael." But still, he grinned and swore eternal allegiance to those who had gifted him with such strength. The flesh and bones of those he needed to fight against would soon know the true meaning of power.

After Azrael cleared out an entire Librarium bastion in a test mission—and did so with the utmost of ease—Project Dragunov was declared a success. More vials of the serum went into production, and plans to inject the rest of Sector Seven's fighting force with it were made. The NOL and its Ars Magus would crumble before the might of Dragunov, and science would reign supreme over the world.

But Azrael put a stop to all of that a mere week after his transformation. His body was not all that changed under Dragunov's influence. Something crimson, something malevolent, infected his mind at the same time, a small mental miasma that spread. The cancer of rage and bloodthirst swallowed whole everything about the man Azrael once was, bit by bit. At first he resisted, often collapsing to clutch his aching forehead with roars of pain and hate. But there was nothing he could do about it; its progress was inexorable. Why did he fight? A thought he tried to hold on to as long as he could, to stifle the spread of this corruption. He had a noble cause, one that would eventually sate Dragunov's influence. Surely it wouldn't wrest this one last thing from him, would it?

But even that hallowed thought proved susceptible to the taint. His will and that of Dragunov—no, of Azrael—wrestled over that single thought, until both snapped. In a veil of hatred and wrath, he rampaged through the halls of the Sector Seven laboratory where he had been born. He alone brought down Project Dragunov; the serum lay in pools on the floor, mingling with the blood of the scientists that had created it. When Azrael awoke, head pounding, heart racing, he looked over the scene… and then threw back his head to laugh. Mad cackles echoed down the macabre halls, signaling the death of not only Project Dragunov, but the man who had existed before Azrael.

Why did he fight? Why did it matter? He fought for the same reason others ate. Fighting was sustenance, not some means to protect whatever his former self thought was important. _Nothing_ was important; everything was transient. So what else was there to do, except to hunt down his prey and enjoy the fight it brought?

News spread through the remainder of Sector Seven of Azrael's madness, and Project Dragunov was deemed a failure. The human mind could not handle the power it brought. But the higher-ups of the organization sought some boon from this failure. To gain nothing, and lose some of their brightest minds, was utterly unacceptable. They reached out to Azrael, trying to get him on their side. At first, their efforts were to no avail; no messenger never returned. But fortune smiled upon them; the Ikaruga War broke out, and they had the perfect ammo for convincing their monster. Gleeful, Azrael stepped onto the battlefield on the side of Ikaruga, what many took to be the side of freedom. And he stomped all over that ideal, killing without regard for who stood before him and laughing over the floods of the dead. This was paradise. This was all that mattered to him. This was…

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><p>Azrael grunts as he awakens in an alleyway. Why was he thinking about that again? It was his past, and it was completely irrelevant to what he did now. After all, fighting is all that matters to him. Why should he give a shit about the past? Did some part of him, somehow, seek the ideal he fought so hard to protect from Dragunov's influence?<p>

With a shake of his head, he laughs off the thought as he rises to his feet. No, of course not. That is complete foolishness. The him that is had long since killed the him that used to be. He feels nothing for it; no regret, no wistfulness, not even joy. After, there is no importance to whatever he once idealized. Such a weakling as his old self did not deserve to exist.

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><p><strong>AN: Two new stories coming soonish probably. One, a stupid fic of randomly generated ships. The other, for a different series altogether.  
><strong>


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